Year Zero is a hilarious sci fi romp that is this summer’s best geek beach read

The aliens have arrived and they really just want to rock out — at a reasonable price.

That’s the starting premise of Year Zero by Rob Reid, which is being hailed as this summer’s best beach read for science fiction and music geeks. Released in July, the book has a lot of fun with some of science fiction’s best known premises. It’s an often hilarious satire on much of current entertainment, including reality TV, the legal profession and fandom (interstellar and otherwise), but the book’s crowning achievement is that it actually makes copyright funny.

“There are enough absurdities in copyright that I think I’ve only just begun to mine its comedic potential,” says Reid.

It is the story of Nick Carter, a young copyright lawyer at a firm who is approached by alien visitors seeking a licensing deal for all the music ever created so that extraterrestrials can enjoy our tunes in perpetuity. It turns out they — and all the other off planet residents of the universe — are huge fans of Earth’s music, and have been for more than 30 years, but the aliens have recently realize that the method they’ve been enjoying our tunes is by pirating music. By their interpretation of copyright laws — most notably the $150,000 penalty per illegally downloaded song in the U.S. — the combined wealth of the galaxy is now owed to humanity. While some of the extraterrestrials want to work out a deal, others feel that simply destroying our planet to wipe out the debt is a tidier solution. From this, the book’s often hilarious and silly farce of a story spins out.

Reid is no stranger to music and copyright, as he was one of the founders of Rhapsody, a digital music subscription service launched in 2001, and while his time at the negotiating table with labels and lawyers clearly informed this story, he says it was turning a science fiction trope on its head that was the genesis for the story.

“I had the very core idea that wouldn’t it be neat to have aliens who love something about our society and our culture many, many years ago. The reason was all the science fiction I read as a kid was that when aliens showed up, if they wanted something from us, it was something that we stumbled into. They wanted our habitable planet, or our brains to put into jars and power their spaceships, or our phosphates or whatever,” he says. “I just thought, just once, wouldn’t it be cool if the aliens thought we were awesome?”

Reid’s book is a fun and madcap affair, and as a result has been likened to Douglas Adam’s classic Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which has caused some consternation from hardcore fans of that book. He considers it a touchstone, but it’s not the only one.

“My publisher made a point about that in the press materials, and it’s clearly in the tradition of Hitchhikers, and some people get very bent out of shape about that, ‘how dare anything be in that tradition?’ But nobody has said it was better than Adams’ books,” he says. “Really, any work of playful science fiction at all that has come out since the ’70s is absolutely in the tradition of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

Reid is honoured by the comparison, but says he was actually influenced more by Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem.

For music fans, the book is filled with references, and knowing nods. Some are obvious, like the chapter titles, which have song titles like “Free Falling,” and “Whiter Shade of Pale.” Others are more veiled, like an alien leader spouting off heavy metal lyrics as dialogue. Also in the back of the book are playlists for all of the characters, which he says helped make the characters come alive in his writing process.

“I think very deeply about music, and I’m very familiar with the musical tastes of the people I hang around with, to me what that seems to say about them, so I generated these playlists for the characters, and I ultimately learned a thing about the characters from what they listen too,” he says. “Clearly, my obsessive fan-ishness of music kind of permeates the book.”

As for our real world, Reid is still very up on music technology and the ongoing copyright fights that are still taking place. He feels that the move toward streaming services is going to be the big game changer in the coming decade.

“I think I’m really excited to see streaming music take off. We were certainly 10 years too early with Rhapsody, which in some ways is a mark of honour, as opposed to shame. It’s nice to do something before everyone else is,” he says.

“To me the most exciting thing in the world is these all-you-can-eat (listen) streaming services are really starting to catch on. We are at the very beginning of the steep end of the curve. It’s already huge on campuses, and I think that is going to become the dominant mode of consuming music in the next 10 years. As that occurs, I think that number of artists that are going to be able develop very, very widespread geographic audiences to is going to grow in orders of magnitude. I think the diversity and richness of the music fan’s experience will also follow.”

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